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Tuesday, December 13, 2016

Imagine for a moment, a person who claims all rocks are sacred, and that sitting on one or otherwise touching your ass to it is offensive in the extreme. Additionally, if you incidentally do touch the rock in an way deemed uncouth by them, they demand you apologize.

Now, imagine I come along and say, no rocks are sacred, they're just rocks, and they're best for sitting on, scratching with, and generally touching your butt to is not only fine, it's your right to do so.

Good. Next, suppose a popular actress comes along and touches her butt to some rocks. Maybe she knocks a few of them over.

Still with me?

Okay.

So JLaw is called out for demeaning the sacred rocks of some Hawaiian people because they say she desecrated it with her woman butt.

They demand she apologize.

She does. Because, presumably, she's a nice person. Her actions seem to validate this assumption about her character.

Now, let me ask you this. Is all of Hawaii going to apologize to me for defying my beliefs with their nonsensical claims that all rocks are sacred when I in fact believe the exact opposite?

Not likely.

Because there is a double standard at play.

You see, I didn't cry. I didn't caterwaul. I didn't complain that my feelings got hurt for the arbitrary rules you failed to adhere to that I made up.

And everyone gobbled them up. The media most of all. Yummy, yummy, tears.

They...and here it is...became emotional.

Appeal to emotion.

Their *sacred* beliefs were attacked by JLaw's butt! Cue the waterworks!

They are sad. They are crying. Their feelings are hurt, goddammit!

Obviously, obviously JLaw has to apologize. She looks so vicious, so callous, so wrong to have offended. After all, real people with real feelings feel accosted.

Appeal to emotion.

You know who's not getting an apology, though?

Me.

Why?

Two reasons.

One, I didn't cry. I didn't get emotional. I didn't turn mole hills into mountains. And I didn't demand anyone coddle me.

Second, I never claimed rocks were sacred. Because they're not. They're just fucking not. Okay?

It's people who place value on things, it's people who must imbue inanimate objects, like rocks, with sacrosanctity. It's people who subjectively determine what will or won't offend them. They choose their limits. They draw the imaginary line.

I do not do these things, but my beliefs were equally trampled on and disregarded by the Hawaiian people.

But they got emotional. They made it about their sacred rights. They cried the loudest.

They got the apology.

Such an obvious double standard.

But that's not the worst of it.

It gets much worse.

Precisely because I didn't grow emotional or allow myself to be offended, my very real belief is devalued, considered less important than the Hawaiian people's.

It's not sacred, so what do I lose, right?

I have no emotional investment, how can I be affected?

This is about real people with real feelings, with real history, goddammit!

A history ripe with oppression and mistreatment by outsiders who didn't respect their beliefs. A history full of real abuses.

But that's not now. This is now. Not then.

So what has changed?

Cultural sensitivity, perhaps? Cultural awareness? Historical knowledge? Maybe all of it. But what does this recent trend in outrage and scapegoating say about society?

It says we place more value on emotional sentimentality than we do on equality of belief.

Your beliefs be damned if you don't get regularly worked up over someone not sharing them.

You see, that's how you get attention. By caterwauling. By demanding a high profile actress apologize for her young adult antics. Because you, by God, felt offended.

I don't. So I don't get an apology. Nor would I ever demand one for simply having a different belief. I don't believe in the sacred. I'm 100% a contrarian. Irreverent till the end.

But because I am this way, I don't appeal to your baser emotions. I can't get your reptilian brain flowing with rage at the mere idea of someone not abiding by the tribal laws.

But if you cry, those sympathetic enough, those who make their every judgment based on emotional pleas, will come rushing in to demand JLaw apologize for offending the absurd notion of sacred rocks.

And we love to see people eat crow. We, being emotional creatures, straight up love it. Seeing someone be forced to bow down and kowtow, to admit to the offense of whatever imaginary crime they have committed, to fess up and apologize, it makes us salivate.

We love it. Because, why would anyone cry if it wasn't a greater offense than spilled milk? Why would anyone feign feeling accosted? They wouldn't. They must genuinely feel that way. We must apologize to them. Make them feel better again. Make amends.

We must have justice!

Right?

FUCK THAT!

Getting justice implies a real moral wrong has been committed.

The only moral wrong I see is that JLaw was emotionally blackmailed into apologizing for some made up offense.

If you think I'm being crass, that I don't get it, that the beliefs really were sacred and deserving of everyone's veneration, then I'm afraid you've been bamboozled by the appeal to emotion here.

Let me make one thing clear. I will respect people 's reasonable requests. Don't scratch you ass on our sacred objects. Okay. But make it very clear what you mean by that prior to my actually doing it. Don't expect me to know hundreds and thousands of years of history completely unfamiliar, if not irrelevant, to me. Make yourself clear. Not after the fact. Before it.

That's your responsibility. If you want people to know something, you must teach them. You can't expect them to magically know what they don't know. That doesn't make a lick if sense.

By the way, as it turns out, it wasn't a sacred rock. Those don't exist. It wasn't even part of the burial grounds that JLaw disturbed. It was an umarked pile of rocks which may or may not have been related to the customary beliefs of the people. The damage was fixed and the rocks were put back exactly as they had been found, just in case.

Yet JLaw still was said to have committed a grave offense of butt to rock.

And just so you know exactly how topical I'm being with this blog post, here are some media outlets that have reported on it:

According to the folks at Feedspot, a new web-venture media news blog, the Advocatus Atheist ranks in the top 30 of blogs based on, according to Feedspot, these criteria:

Google reputation and Google search ranking

Influence and popularity on Facebook, twitter and other social media sites

Quality and consistency of posts.

Feedspot’s editorial team and expert review

I'm humbled and flattered to be included in these other fine blogs. And I'll put the badge on my site proudly. If anything, the analystics seem sound. And if we're going by raw numbers, well, that's good news for this blog which I've maintained for over a decade. Although I don't post nearly as much as I used to, I still get around to it once in a while. Once a month on average according to Feedspot, Alexa, and Google Analytics.